Install ISPConfig3 on an Ubuntu 14.10 Server – Part 1

Although the command line is a powerful tool that can allow you to work quickly and easily in many circumstances, there are instances where a visual interface is helpful. If you are configuring many different services on one machine, or administering portions of your system for clients, tools like ISPConfig can make this a much simpler task.

ISPConfig is a control panel for your server that allows you to easily configure domains, email addresses, site configurations, and user accounts. We will be installing the panel on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

Prerequisites

Ubuntu Server 14.10 with Open SSH Server Installed.

Upgrade the System

The first thing we should do is upgrade the base system. This will ensure that the packages on our system are the newest packaged versions.

We should update our local package index before we do this so that apt knows about the latest package versions:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Verify Hostnames are Configured Correctly

We will start by making sure our hostnames are configured correctly. In this guide, we are going to be assuming that the domain name that we are setting up is server.test.com and the IP address for the server is 111.111.111.111.

We need to verify that our hostname is configured correctly. We should look at our hosts file:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

It may look something like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost server.haneefputtur.com server

We want to make our hostnames use our public IP address. You can do this by splitting up the line into two lines and pointing the domain name portion to our public IP address:

127.0.0.1 localhost
111.111.111.111 server.haneefputtur.com server

Save and close the file when you are finished.

We should also edit our hostname file to make sure that it contains the correct domain name as well:

sudo nano /etc/hostname

If your whole hostname is not displayed, modify the value:

server.haneefputtur.com

You should make sure the system uses the new value by typing:

sudo hostname -F /etc/hostname

Change System Settings

There are a few items that Ubuntu configures in an unconventional way that we need to undo in order for our software to function properly.

The first thing we need to do is disable AppArmor, which is incompatible with ISPConfig. First, we should stop the service:

sudo service apparmor stop

We can also tell it to unload its profiles by typing:

sudo service apparmor teardown

After this is done, we need to tell our server not to start this service at boot:

sudo update-rc.d -f apparmor remove

We can actually delete all of the associated files and packages by typing:

sudo apt-get remove apparmor

Another configuration that we need to modify is the default system shell. Ubuntu uses the dash shell for system processes, but ISPConfig leverages additional functionality that is provided specifically by bash. We can set bash to be the default system shell by typing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash

At the prompt, select “No” to have the utility reconfigure the system shell pointer to use bash instead of dash.